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English Faculty Publications
2008
Breaking Forms: The Shift to Performance in Late
Twentieth-Century Irish Drama
Christie L. Fox
Utah State University
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Breaking Forms: The Shift to Performance in Late Twentieth-Century Irish Drama. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
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CHAPTER ONE
DEFINING THE MOMENT
Leaving the Pub and the Kitchen Behind
Perhaps it was the idea that the century was drawing to a close, a
century that saw Ireland gain its freedom from Britain and the
establishment of a literary-based theatrical tradition known all over the
world for evoking human emotions and pathos, for presenting an
Everyman such as Christy Mahon to the world. And perhaps after the Irish
theatrical revival of the 1970s, which saw the rise of great playwrights like
Brian Friel and Frank McGuinness, the ' next wave of Irish drama simply
had to move in a different direction.
Irish theater and cultural critic Fintan O' Toole has suggested that "we
have been through a particular movement in our theatre and in our society
over the last 30 years and that that movement is now at a close.' He
continues: ' The drama which has been present in our society has moved
on and the theatre is moving on with it. ... If this is true, then we have to
find new ways of talking about it of evaluating it, even of defining what is
and is not dramatic' (2000, 48). This serves as a good starting point for
this book, as part of my goal is to redefine what is dramatic and to take
some steps toward fmding a way of talking about this ' new ' drama
present in Irish society. The long tradition of Irish theater is literary, textbound, and privileges the author. In the late twentieth century, a new type
of Irish theater in direct opposition to tIus tradition gained popularity. This
new theater de-privileged text and emphasized physical performance.
Much of it was in search of a distinctly Irish type of physicality or gesture
created from a synthesis of ancient Irish performance forms such as
mumming and European fonns such as the commedia dell arte and French
mime. Physical theater practitioners sought to define a new style of
movement and of theater that reflected Irish society more fully. The
movement, as I see it, began in the 1970s, but did not really take hold until
the Irish economy improved in the late 1980s and especiaUy the 1990s.
Christopher Murray identified the 1980s- a time of rapid social
change in Ireland evidenced to pick an example by the divorce referenda
6
7
Chapter One
Defining the Moment
(even if the first one was not successful) and a series of government
messes that would result in the abundant tribunals of the 1990s-as
creating a climate "more hospitable to the creation of good drama (in the
theatre) than had been the climate of stagnation in the age of deValera"
( 1997, 224). Murray begins rus exploration of the contemporary theater
with a discussion of the triumvirate of literary Irish drama in the 1980s,
Tom Murphy, Brian Friel, and Hugh Leonard. Readers of Murray ' s book
note that two of these, Murphy and Friel were also the creators of the
"powerful resistance shown to the new Ireland of the 1960s" (225), thus
leading the reader to understand that, in terms of literary theater, the
personnel had not changed much in twenty years. There is no doubt that
these playwrights changed the landscape of Irish drama and created
phenomenal works that still carry the power to bring an audience up short,
to remind us of where we come from and who we are. Yet, around this
time a different kind of change was taking place in Irish drama. Actors and
small independent companies were looking for new ways to express
themselves, and they were often looking abroad-to Europe and not
America-for the answers.
Although the 1970s and 1980s saw radical changes in the way that the
arts are funded it wasn' t until the 1990s that Ireland climbed out of the
economic mire so inscribed in classical Irish texts, via the so-called Celtic
Tiger economy. Suddenly endowed with government funding the
independent theater sector in Ireland flourished. One of the results of the
1973 Arts Act (implemented by Liam Cosgrave's government) was an
increased international emphasis: artists started receiving funding to study
abroad and the government sponsored more international arts acts to come
to Ireland. The Dublin Theatre Festival and the Galway Arts Festival both
increased international visibility of the arts by bringing accomplished
artists from Europe and beyond to an Irish audience. Most important was
the opportunity for funding-strapped smaJl companies and individual
artists to see these international artists, to see new ways of performing and
even defining theater.
The major impact of these European practitioners was their use of
movement. As Irish theater remained deeply literary Irish actors did not
get a sense of how to move their bodies; the emphasis was always on the
text and actor training in Ireland remained very limited. 1 Thus when
c~mpanies such as England s Footsbarn Travelling Theatre and Spain's
J?ls Comediants performed in Ireland, Irish actors saw opportunities.
Around this time, Irish actors began to study the styles of Etienne
Decroux, Jacques Lecoq, and Marcel Marceau. These French movement
specialists brought a dimension of mime and physicality to the idea of
performance rutherto unknown to the Irish audience.
For the Irish actor, however, French movement would not entirely
suffice, which is why the work of Mikel Murfi one of the fowlders of
Barabbas . . . the company 2 breaks through boundaries. Christopher
Berchild writes:
Murfi stands at the forefront of a new direction in Irish performance that
embraces continental European p)lysical theatre disciplines in order to
develop a ftmdamentally Irish sense of expression. Irish physicality, which
can be considered compact at best, seems to defy more traditional physical
perfonnance techniques of broad and exaggerated movement; it therefore
has received little critical attention. (2002 50)
It is the purpose of this book then, to provide the beginnings of that
critical attention and to examine the impact of movement and European
performance techniques on the Irish theatrical style. I contend that the shift
to performance is not just a fad, nor practiced merely by a few fringe
companies' rather, it held sway in Irish theater throughout the 1990s and
has exerted a pressure on mainstream Irish theater. It is not the purpose of
this book to say that the Irish literary tradition is bad ' or is somehow
irrelevant. Rather I hope to define a moment in Irish theater that I believe
had lasting impact and consequences and to help develop a critical
vocabulary with wruch to talk about and analyze these works. We need to
learn how to talk about these performance techniques if we hope to expand
our discussion of Irish theater beyond the literary. As Stephen Watt has
argued, a hierarchy in which the play the closed and infmitely
reproducible work, resides at the apex is clearly incompatible with
today ' s" performances (1998, 34). According to Alan Read, ' In order to
poach on the unwritten theatre criticism needs to address the ' aura' of
theatre, its unrepeatability its resistance to mechanical reproduction"
(1993 , 15). In many ways, Irish theater criticism is as locked into the
literary as Irish theater was twenty years ago, and an effective method of
discussing and analyzing Irish performance has not yet been developed. In
ways, I am echoing Elinor Fuchs 's goal in The Death o/Character, where
she described herself as a theater critic in search of language in which to
describe new forms" (1996, 1).
Many Irish theater companies adopted a collaborative method which,
combined with devised theater and a decentering of the text mirrored the
disintegration of Ireland as a shared place or communally recognizable
society. In addition, this theater took issue with the traditional way of life
and began to look for alternatives. A ' new" society, one focused on urban
8
Chapter One
centers rather than rural traditions, interested and immersed in the instant
gratification that globalization brings and at the same time bewildered by
the fractures in traditional society, needed a new art fonn and theater
artists stepped in to try to fill the void, or perhaps to refl~ct their own
exp.eriences through a communal art fonn. In place of a so-called single
society was a bustling growing adaptive society-a~d the ephemerality
of theater, theater that cannot even be written down properly, with no
chance of endless restaging or replication, resonated with artists ' and
audiences ' lives.
. Until the period of time covered by this book, studies of dramatic
literature concerned themselves largely with what writers write"
(Schechner 1988, 85); this is still true of studies of Irish drama. This book,
however, is more concerned with ' what audiences see" or even ''what
actors act" onstage. That is, I am emphasizing the performance text rather
than the written text-which, I argue, is what independent theater
companies in Ireland did in the 1990s. Richard Schechner defines the
, performance text ' as ' everything that happens during a performance both
onstage and off, including audience participation" (1985, 22). This
definition holds franchise here, but I generally do not discuss what
happens offstage unless that too is visible to the audience.
"Performance" another fraught tenn, is generally used here as an
adjective: ' performance techniques.'
Richard Bauman defines
performance as an aesthetically marked and heightened mode of
communication, framed in a special way and put on display for an
audience" (1992, 41). While I certainly agree with that definition I am
using 'performance techniques" to refer to the unspoken communicative
devices used onstage by a perfonner to convey meaning. In the theater
community, performance' generally refers to performance art, stand-up
comedy American-style 'happenings," and other nontextual events that
occur in front of an audience. I am certainly borrowing from this
definition, but as the theater artists I discuss argue implicitly for a
dissolution of the. strict boundaries between theater and performance, 1
acknowledge that ill my own argument and definitions.
In its move away from the literary text, some Irish theater skewed so
far in the other direction that it had no written text at all. Again, this is
ground Schechner has already covered but not in an Irish context:
In theatre that comes from workshop, there is no preexistent script--or
there are too many scripts ( materials" or "sources"). The words do not
determine everything else but are knitted into a performance text consisting
of many braided strands: lighting, costumes scenography (the arrangement
DefIning the Moment
9
of the performers in the space), theatre architecture music and so on.
(1985, 20)
This kind of theater is perceived as ephemeral, but often the scripts do
exist and they are even in some cases archived.
While the Irish move toward performance arose out of a particular
moment in terms of funding, it also grew from a premise that words alone
were no longer sufficient to express the rapidly changing Irish society and
the confusing emotional state brought about by the passing of tradition and
the establishment of a new, multicultural Irish society. One of the most
significant moves of Irish theater is the move away from nostalgia.
Playwright Declan Hughes voiced a sentiment shared by many
contemporary Irish theatergoers: "I could live a long and happy life
without seeing another play set in a Connemara kitchen, or a country pub '
(2000, 13). He calls nostalgia an affliction of the Irish theater. Similarly
theater critic Helen Meany is reputed to have said that she had seen so
many plays about the father-son relationship that she had started to feel as
though she'd had one herself. At the time new types of Irish theater gained
momentum, Irish society was changing very quickly, and nostalgia as a
mood no longer obtained. The theater community responded by devising
new plays that emphasized the visual, finding that words alone could not
express the inchoate emotions brought on by globalization and cultural
shifts.
Referring to the flowering of Irish cultural life following independence,
Declan Kiberd quotes Deleuze and Guattari: "Expression must break
forms encourage ruptures and new sproutings.... When a form is broken,
one must reconstruct the context that will necessarily be a part of the
rupture in the order of things' (Deleuze and Guattari 1986, 28' quoted in
Kiberd 1995 117). While Kiberd uses this frame to describe the
establishment of the Irish national literature it is entirely possible that
artists viewed the stagnation of Irish theatrical forms in the same way,
seeing a need for a new tradition to articulate what had not been
previously expressed onstage. These ruptures came through
experimentation with soundscapes, with movement and gesture, with
animating the set as a character- all attempts to communicate outside the
form of spoken language and all techniques tried first by Beckett whose
impact will be discussed more fully in the next chapter.
10
Chapter One
New Ways of Making Theater
~his dramatic transfonnation of Irish theater was not merely a surge or
proltfic moment but a radical change in who could do theater and what it
looked like. Irish Arts Council funding in the 1990s helped dozens of new
theater companies get started. Many of them are gone now, but the
confluence of energy fed on Ireland's emerging European identity, as
~an~ ~f these .young theater practitioners looked toward Europe for
mspuatlOn and mnovative perfornlance forms. At the same time Irish
theater and music gained nearly unprecedented international pop~larity
from 1~95 ' s Riv;rda~ce to The Beauty Queen of Leenane s Tony Award
sw~ep. m ~ 998. This convergence of money and popularity helped
reVitalIze Irish theater, and a group of theater artists experimenting with
what theater could do and what it might look like coalesced into a
movement that has contributed to what Brian Singleton and Anna
McMullan refer to an identity crisis" in Irish drama. In this crisis, new
theatre practices are reshaping definitions of Irish theatre and
performance," while the "parameters of authorship ... and the very label
'Irish ' are being renegotiated" (2003 3).
A profound change in Irish drama, expressed as an attempt to redefine
what a play is, what an audience is- regardless of the theme of the
work- allowed for a replication of the societal change experienced in the
country since the ] 980s. Theater practitioners working in collaboration to
bring physicality to the Irish stage sought to explore, express, and reflect a
part of society that they felt could not be represented naturalistically. The
reliance on text lost its relevance. They rejected nostalgia and repetition
and indeed often mocked it.
Some principal markers of this type of theater are:
• It is nonnaturalistic, privileging form over content or theme;
• It de-privileges text, emphasizing performance and gesture;
• Likewise, it de-privileges the 'author-god,' privileging the
performer;
• It incorporates elements of folklore and ritual.
Most importantly, it is metatheatrical and reflects upon the nature and
function of the?ter itself Theater artists experimenting with perfonnance
wa~t to detennme anew what can be considered theater, a script even an
audl.e~ce. They are not content to be a continuation of a century-long
tradition, but want to break the boundaries of theatrical experience and
create a ne~ theatrical language. These elements remain fairly constant in
the dramatic perfonnances of the 1990s, and their precursors are found in
Defining the Moment
11
the plays of the 1970s and 1980s, which created a foundation for further
experimentation.
The elevation of form over content and theme was in many ways a
rejection of mainstream Irish theater. A concern with the formal aspects of
theater began to raise questions about the very nature of a dramatic text.
Was language required for a ' play '? Must the spectators enter the theater
fust? What if we destroy not only the fourth wall but all the walls? If Irish
theater has always been a reflection of Irish society-or at least an
idealized view of it- then what made this new theater necessary for a
radically changing society? This type of theater sought to answer
questions first posed by Peter Brook: 'What is a theatre? What is a play?
What is an actor? What is a spectator? What is the relation between them
all? What conditions serve this best?' (Brook s program note to The
Tempest Center for International Theatre Research 1968, quoted in Innes
1993, 3).4
I refer to this theater as performance based because, in
attempting to respond to Brook's challenge these theater artists turned to
answers more commonly found in ' performance" and began to question
the form of Irish theater. To be sure, some of this work was more
performance-or even dance---than theater (see chapter 6 for more on
dance) but the most innovative and engaging artists and productions
strove to find ways of combining the traditional notions of performance
with theater. The theater companies under discussion here quite
consciously seek new answers to these questions, by demanding more (or
sometimes less) of their actors as well as their spectators, and by
embarking on an endeavor to change Irish theatre by re-creating it on a
technical level.
In trying to determine why this change at this time, Declan Kiberd
suggested that we look back to one origin of this literary theatrical
tradition: the "explosion of brilliant writing in English at the end of the
19th century was among other things, a myth of compensation. A people
who had hobbled themselves by going dumb in their native language now
sought to console themselves by proving that they could write the new
language more eloquently than its official owners." Thus it makes sense
that, on the verge of a new century, audiences and scholars would see an
"attempt by the current generation of artists to reconnect our theatre of the
word with those experiences buried deep in our bodies,' a condition
Kiberd refers to as ' one of the glories of our current culture ' (2006, xiv).
Indeed, the (re)introduction of bodies to the Irish theater was greeted
with a certain amount of relief by many observers, but what made the time
right for this change was a particular set of conditions and cultural
circumstances that left the word- previously so trustworthy- under
12
Chapter One
suspicion as an adequate mode of representation. Writer and director Gina
Moxley suggested that 'parameters are broadened because people travel
more and see more. . . . People [in the 1990s] began to realize that the
body is capable of such lyricism that you can ' t just rely on the verbals
completely" (Mulrooney 2006, 196). Choreographer David Bolger noted
that the 'verbals," or rhythms, of the plays always had a movement
counterpart: "When you open up some of the lyricism and movement in
the plays there is an extraordinary amount of movement. . . . There are
huge rhythms in these plays . . . [and] movement is not disconnected from
speech' (151). In his choreography, Bolger builds on the natural rhythm of
speech, specifically Irish speech, to create an Irish idiom of movement.
Bernadette Divilly believes that Irish bodies have been carrying a
' sense of poverty, shame and hunger'" and that they tend to "contract
. and feel unsafe about expressing ' (13). Thus the shift toward
performance resonated strongly in the 1990s and continues to today in part
because the fragmented, nonverbal form attempts to express the unvoiced
~oncern. that Iri~h society no longer has a set of values in common (if
md~ed It ever did) and that the cultural referents come from a globalized
polIs rather than a rural village. O'Toole states that there is no longer a
unified Irish experience celebrated in the vision of traditional Ireland ....
What we have instead are fragments, isolated pieces of a whole story that
no one knows " which is why a text that appears fragmentary and a
performance that mistrusts the word reflects conditions today (2000, 54).
At the same time, it is a loss. Audiences in the early part of the twentieth
century saw the "Irish peasant as a symbol of their lost identity" (Katz
Clark, quoted in Richards 2004 5). Conventional wisdom held that
because the national theater was so popular, the audience shared thi~
defini.tion of Irish identity, regardless of their own oppositional
expenence.
Although these referents may never have been shared, the widespread
perception is that they were and that the late twentieth century and its
faste.r-pa~ed l.ifestyle (bringing with it an increase in quality of life, jobs
a~d ImmigratIOn) have erased them. This change cannot be expressed in a
kJtchen or a pub, because that is not where it took place and these settings
no longer make sense in an Irish context. According to Elin Diamond,
Because the "materials" of a collective past are no longer accessible they
have to be read out of the detritus of what remains' the faint auratic glow
of the wish image in the discarded commodity needs to be fanned in order
to renew our political energies, to deepen our experiences of/in the present.
The performance artist . . . interrelates both these elements: first, a
recovery of the contradictory energies of popular culture ... as a strategy
Deflning the Moment
13
for reflection resistance. and comedy; second, an embodied troping on
temporality through which we grasp what is innovative and politically
resonant in these practices: a subtle refimctioning of experience. (1997,
150)
In the Irish case, it was not performance art so much as the methodology
of performance that attempted the "subtle refunctioning of experience. ' At
the same time, Irish theatre itself underwent a less subtle refunctioning,
that broadened the scope of what Irish theatre could say and how it could
be expressed. The small ruptures in the 1970s came to a nexus in the late
1990s through early 2000 and 2001.
The Rejection of Realism
A rejection of realism permitted theater artists to explore new forms of
representation, including dance, puppetry, mime, clowning and commedia
dell 'arte. This shift started at least as early as 1969, when the Project Arts
Centre became a venue for plays especially the work of Peter and Jim
Sheridan. Even earlier, Beckett rejected both realism and naturalism as
insufficient modes of representation.
Other theatrical traditions have found it necessary to renounce realism
in order to fmd new methodologies and to reflect a contemporary reality.
For example, American feminist performance theorists "asked if realism
was too prescriptive for new understandings of gender race, and sexual
relations [in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries]. How might
postmodem forms, with less coherent and insistently linear narratives,
more fluid fragmented plots and characters, and less fixed determinations
of location and space, allow spectators to see gender in more expansive,
progressive ways?' (Dolan 2005, 64). The same techniques regarding plot,
character location and space helped Irish theater artists and audiences
alike see identity and the very concept of Irishness in ' more expansive,
progressive ways. '
Diamond goes further in explaining the effect and necessity of
rejecting realism in a theater that wishes to understand the past:
The spectator and performer fmd themselves looking not at each other (or
not only), nor at an object of desire, but at a dialectical image. And here the
sign-referent gap of "classical" mimesis is overwritten .... In a moment of
mimetic apprehension, the commoditized images embodied and destroyed
by [feminist performance artists] ... suddenly illuminate the crises of the
present. Old habits of thinking/judging/performing are temporarily set
aside. (1997 180)
15
Chapter One
Defming the Moment
Diamond suggests that this dialectical image-a Brechtian gestlls- is
preferable to realism not because it cures all ills but because it reminds
us that the present is not owned by the past." Gesturing to Benjamin, she
states that 'the past becomes readable only through the present image that
transforms it, the present understandable only through that transformative
reading" (181). She argues that traditionally understood mimesis is
undermined and reinvented by the techniques and practice of performance
art and, combining Brecht Benjamin, and feminist theory, we can derive a
new understanding of the present and the past and the way that bodies (in
her case, specifically female bodies) work in and through performance.
She further contends that only by abandoning realism could feminist
performers approach any kind of truth.
Although I am not making a feminist critique here, her argument
regarding the instability of truth and the necessity for finding new ways to
approach it through performance art-or what I am calling performance
technique-pertains to the Irish case. It is perhaps not a coincidence that
this shift to performance happened at a time when the authorized versions
of Irish revolutionary history were being called into question by revisionist
histories further destabilizing the very nature and meaning of Irish
identity. The emphasis on bodies onstage may also have reflected anxiety
about what ' Irish" looks like: the debate was inscribed indelibly on the
bodies of racially marked immigrants. Thus the body entered (obliquely)
into the national political debate as much as it did the changing theatrical
landscape.
experimenting without language at least since Yeats (who nonetheless
asserted the primacy of the word on the Irish stage). Nonetheless, in order
to be revolutionary in Irish terms, a play must at the very least take issue
with the word. Dramatists and theater practitioners in the late 1990s found
that the word could not be trusted as a signifier. Furthermore, the language
in the Irish theater of the 1980s and early 1990s led audiences into
nostalgia for an Irish society that prevailed before globalization and
urbanization; the only recourse left to theater artists, then was to
undermine the supremacy of language on the stage.
14
De-privileging Text in Favor of Performance
Perhaps the most profound experimentation occurred with the decision
to de-privilege text and use it as only part of a soundscape. Anna
McMullan expresses a hope that "refocusing on performance may offer a
new way of looking at the texts of the Irish theatre tradition, and how this
tradition may be opened up, regenerated and made more inclusive" (1996,
31). The direction of Irish theater away from the word was another
democratizing change in methodology that shifted the idea of what a play
could be.
In Twentieth-Century Irish Drama: Mirror Up to Nation , Christopher
Murray states that 'Irish drama is a long, energetic dispute with a
changing audience over the same basic issues: where we come from,
where we are now, and where we are headed. ' While most drama is
concerned with these essential ideas, ' all such questions emanate from a
passion for language" ( 1997 224). Irish dramatists have been
Privileging the Performer over an "Author-God"
One hallmark of this new theater style is the rejection of the "authorgod" and the de-emphasizing of the role of the playwright. Much
independent, experimental Irish theater is "devised," or created without a
preexisting script. The text of the play emerges through a period of time,
during which a group of performers and perhaps a writer get together and
work through ideas symbols, narrative and meanings to create a piece of
theater. The resultant performance text often remains unpublished,
seemingly incomplete, and less accessible to scholars, which helps to
explain why so little scholarship has followed this movement. The Theatre
du Soleil in France follows a similar creation pattern, eschewing a single
author and placing a group of actors together in a room to see what will
develop. Ariane Mnouchkine described the impetus for the Theatre du
Soleil as coming from a desire to create something different from what
was available in French theater in the 1960s. Her ideal working
environment, she said, is one
in which each of its members would be able to find nourishment; which we
would all manage; whose course we would be able to influence· in which
technical training would be continuous; in which there wouldn' t be
technicians on one side, workers on the other· where everyone would be
trained in all the different disciplines involved in the enterprise-if we
succeeded in this would it be a communal enterprise phalansterism, or, in
more banal terms, a vibrant theatre company? (Williams 1999, 23)
Mnouchkine' s vision seems to reflect an ideal that a segment of the
independent Irish theater sector strove for in the 1990s. The collaborative
model took hold and resulted in a sprouting of independent theater
companies across the country experimenting with new ways of doing
theater.
16
Chapter One
Deftning the Moment
The rejection of the author-god carries significant ramifications
regarding methodology. As in the American avant-grade movement
(discussed below), "the emphasis shifted from questions of meaning to a
focus on process. As new structures, strategies, and patterns were
established, new understandings became possible and new fonns
emerged" (Aronson 2000, 8). The companies that comprise this movement
have generally adopted collaborative styles; in their devising, the company
of actors often (but not always) helps create the perfonnance text. This
collaborative approach underscores the decentralized position of the text:
the author no longer has the last word on the playscript. Once companies
let go of the author-go~ they changed the way theater could be made.
They could adopt a less hierarchical methodology, which led to different
types of performances (although not all companies did, and this is not
necessarily a prerequisite). The director might replace the author as the
voice of authority, but in many companies, the director changes from
production to production so that authority and power are not centralized in
one person but stay within the collective. This methodology lends itself to
a renewed perspective on text. In a devised text, the final product often
does not look like a traditional script with which scholars and actors are
accustomed to working. The text might come from a group of people in a
room playing and replaying (in Jacques Lecoq' s terminology) to create
theater. Naturally, movement began to fill the space left by the literary
text and it began to hold as important a place in the production
methodology and performance as did the text.
Many companies discovered ritual and myth to be integral in their efforts
to create a new type of Irish theater. One example: early Macnas indoor
theater relied on stories drawn from the Tain Bo Cuailgne, the Cattle Raid
of Cooley. The story functioned as communicative shorthand because the
company could be certain that the audience could fol1ow the plot without
the help of words. At the same time the company reinterpreted these
cultural markers for a contemporary context. Thus, 1994' s Buile
ShuibhnelSweeny (by Paraic Breathnach) becomes not only the story of
the mad bird-king, but an attempt to hold onto Irish tradition in the midst
of radical social and economic change. This strong current of Irish folklore
might contradict the expectations of a vanguard theater, but in the Irish
context these traditional subjects serve to reassure the audience and
provide an avenue into the performance while the companies try to forge a
new way of presenting the stories, a way that makes them relevant in an
age of globalization. Tom MacIntyre a playwright known for
incorporating dance and movement into his plays, declares that Irish
folklore is his oxygen: 'And what an extraordinary oxygen to have
available: Irish folklore, Irish mythology, Irish history the contemporary
scene.' MacIntyre fashioned an idiom for his plays, relying on an
incantatory verbal score, dance, movement, a degree of mime, the images
stick' (2001 , 311). From this idiom he created the stage version of
Kavanaugh's The Great Hunger, discussed later as an early incarnation of
the Irish move toward performance.
Owing perhaps to the unique historical position of the Irish nation-a
2,000-year-old culture within a nation less than 100 years old-markers of
Irishness often take on overtly political valences, while Irish symbols have
for decades been appropriated for political purposes, most notably in
Northern Ireland. Ever since Padraig Pearse likened himself to Cuchulain
in the General Post Office in 1916 Irish folklore has been used to fulfill a
partisan end. In opposition to this (and perhaps out of sheer fatigue), many
performance-oriented theater artists eschew the overtly political and seek
to reclaim these Irish symbols for all Irish people, not just those of a
particular political persuasion. In a way the theater companies are
utilizing these stories to ' create the future out of the past ' a future that
subverts most expectations of traditional practices (Glassie 1995, 395).
The decision to present a traditional, known text serves as a way to eclipse
audience anxiety and let them experience the new form freely.
Irish Folklore and Ritual
Through the rejection of realism, theater can incorporate elements of
primitivism and ritual relying heavily on known texts from Irish folklore
while utilizing these texts in a new and challenging way. Irish theater
companies seeking to destabilize the form of theater often frrst do so
through a performance that relies on a narrative known to the audience
such as the Tain Bo Cuailgne, the Homeric epics, or something from Irish
folklore. The familiarity of these texts creates a space for the theater artists
to experiment with how to tell the story and results in a creative new
performance form. It is important to note that very few Irish theater
co.mpanies reject the text altogether; rather they see it as one element in a
pt?rfonnance. They also do not jettison narrative, which remains a central
component of many independent Irish performances. Instead practitioners
simply present the (familiar) narrative through a form alien-and
sometimes alienating-to the audience.
17
18
Chapter One
Defining the Moment
Metatheatricaiity and the Nature of Theater
irrelevant and unnecessary. Formal experimentation can enable expression
of emotions and events that otherwise elude representation, including the
sense that society is changing faster than culture can cope.
Yet a case can be made that Friel's own Faith Healer, though not
experimental or performance based serves as a precursor to these. First
presented in Dublin in 1980 at the Abbey (it premiered in New York in
1979) the play relies on a shifting nonlinear narrative composed entirely
of monologues. thus breaking from the naturalistic method without
deviating from the literary tradition. Friel has such mastery of the
language (explored most eloquently in Translations) that in his plays,
language becomes plot. ' He trades on the past or, more specifically the
corrupted memory of the past, as in Dancing at Lughnasa. Christina
Mahony suggests that his use of language is often "intended to provoke
. . . a nostalgic reaction,' but his language is the strongest when it
' surpasses or checks the nostalgic impulse to question perceptions of
reality past or present" (Mahony 1998 126). The Faith Healer undermines
the comforting idea of memory 'as something shared and communal,'
while confirming it "as something which has collapsed as a public
phenomenon into a private fiction' (O'Toole 2000, 53). Each version of
the past carries its own truth' thus the concept of truth and the reliability of
the narrator (and, by implication, narrative itself) hold no meaning. If
narrative can no longer be trusted, can character? Can any element of the
playas we know it? The play then, acts as ' a metaphor for theatre itself
where truth exists only at the present moment ' (Morash 2002 251), and
thus Friel created a kind of metatheater that resurfaced again in Dancing at
Lughnasa, a quintessentially text-bound play. Even Friel s early work in
Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964) pursues both the modernist enterprise
of exploring the internal motivations and psychological insights of a
character, and a more formalistic break with tradition by embodying these
insights in a character, Private Gar. Friel is possibly the most textually
accomplished of all contemporary Irish playwrights, yet even he has
experimented with the grammar of narrative. Interestingly, in the wake of
the kinds of plays under discussion here, Friel has returned to very
traditional linear narrative plays in Moll) Sweeney (1994), Afterplay
(2002), and Performances (2003).
Introducing multiple modes of representation makes possible a
reflection of the complexity of Irish society, what Declan Kiberd refers to
as "authenticity,' within which a nation ' has a plurality of identities,
constantly remaking themselves in perpetual renewals' (1995, 298).
Kiberd argues that classic Irish texts 'split the man ' into competing
dualities: StephenIBloom, Joxer/Boyle, Didi/Gogo (299). Extra-linguistic
The most significant aspect of this type of theater is that it sought to
redefme the very nature of theater, to question the assumptions that theater
must follow a set of strict prescriptive rules. Undermining these
prescriptions (theater must be indoors, with clearly delineated actors and
perfonners, based on written text, and usually performed in the dark) freed
the creators of theater to experiment. Some of the impetus was democratic
in nature. Moving theater outside and into the streets ensured that anyone
could see it not just those with disposable income. Opening up roles to the
community and including children or the disabled undermined the idea
that only a select group of people who had a particular training could be
perfonners-or even actors.
Other plays questioned the role of the audience: must an audience sit
politely in the dark, waiting for the action to begin? What if the audience
moved along with the action? This is more than environmental theater
because it involves the audience bodily in the experience: the audience no
longer remains passive. If we can make the audience move, is there a limit
to what we can declare a theater? Obviously street theater rejects the
necessity of a purpose-built theater, but perhaps this ingenuity was born
from necessity: until recently, Ireland suffered from a lack of theatrical
venues. The Project, emerging as both an exhibition space and, later a
performance space lent itself to experimental theater, to the sort of event
that would not be comfortable on the Abbey main stage but that more
accurately reflected the Irish experience of the early 1970s.
Certainly, the questions of ''what is a theater," "what is a play" are not
new, but the answers Irish theater found in the 1990s were. In Northern
~~lan?, Brian Friel, in what could be viewed as a lack of judgment,
dJsmlssed the relevance to the Irish situation of Artaud, Peter Brook,
Roger Planchon, Brecht, theater of the absurd, happenings, theatre of fact
etc. " saying instead that "matter ... is our concern, not form" (Friel 1999:
55-56). This was less than two months after Bloody Sunday stunned the
Irish population and inflamed emotions. 5 Friel effectively cut off any other
modes of expression through which people might have come to terms with
this horrifying event and the continuing civil rights movement other than
the textually bound theater. This resonates strongly with Douglas Hyde' s
assertion that Irish civilization never 'developed a drama ' effectively
erasing centuries-old tradition of Irish folk drama, mumming, pageants,
and so on (Hyde 1905, 511). In a time when new forms of theater
(particularly the cathartic potential of "happenings' ) might have helped
people express inchoate emotions, Friel dismissed these kinds of fonns as
19
21
Chapter One
Defining the Moment
performance texts fracture the self, not into dichotomies or opposites but
into many pieces, many layers, until the self- and Irish culture-is
fragmented and the audience must work to create a whole. Fuchs argues
that "one of the meanings of the ' postmodern' -its psychological
fonnation- . . . was a dispersed idea of self, and . . . this dispersal was
represented in many different ways in the contemporary alternative
theater" (1996, 9). In Brecht' s Lehrstriick (learning play), Die Massnahme
, the autonomous self is not merely a bourgeois illusion, but has the moral
weight of a crime. The analytical separation of actor and character is itself
part of the fiction as the Four Agitators impassively take turns playing
their ' disappeared fifth comrade' (32). This tendency contrasts sharply
with theater that requires or provides a unified interpretation. In fact, much
feminist performance that Fuchs and Diamond write about abandon
unified performance, a trajectory we also see in Irish theater. This impulse,
however, is certainly not new, as Brecht' s exploration demonstrates, nor is
it alien to the Irish stage. Susan Cannon-Harris (2002) includes a chapter
on Yeats' s The Herne Egg that ably demonstrates how the Yeats play
undermines a unified interpretation and can be apprehended only by an
interpretation that holds two conflicting impulses simultaneously.
Although many of these companies no longer exist they succeeded in
nudging Irish theater toward the acknowledgment of the actor' s body in
the communicative methods employed onstage. The summer 2007 issue of
Irish Theatre Magazine dedicated a section of its performance reviews to
' Irish theatre companies [that] are increasingly using new techniques
making plays that are about how theatre itself is being made" (108). This
is a direct outcome of the refocusing that emphasizing performance
brought to the development of Irish theater.
Theater scholar Christina Mahony argued in 1998 that ' some of the
most exciting theatre in Ireland today ... operates outside the parameters
of a set text and confounds the hierarchical concept of a single author.'
These texts Mahony argued, ' must be seen not read '. she found that
trying to read dialogue from these texts was a ' thoroughly frustrating
experience for the reader unable to see a production ' (17). Although trying
to read these texts cold ' or with no previous experience in the genre
would in fact be incredibly frustrating, nonetheless they can-and mustbe read differently from more traditional' text-bound plays. The physical
language present in the texts relies on specific kinds of movements and
objects that can be learned and 'read into ' the texts. Thus with practice,
and with the experience of having seen some of these kinds of
performances, one can read and understand what seems like an unfinished
text. Mahony' S assertion that this is the 'most exciting" type of theater in
Ireland only reinforces the need for a critical examination of the form. To
ignore it is to keep Irish theater locked in a literary past and to create a
skewed history of late twentieth-century Irish theater especially as the
physicality and reintroduction of "performance" profoundly influenced
Irish theater across the board. Furthermore, we can call on the production
companies to assist us in our attempt to read it; as scholars, we can work
with them to develop a new way of 'seeing" the productions in our mind' s
eye. In fact, practitioners have started this process by contributing to
volumes aimed at least in part toward an academic audience. Books such
as Theatre Talk (Chambers et at 2001) and Irish Moves (Mulrooney 2006)
both provide a practitioner s perspective, as does Raymond Keane's
contribution to The Power of Laughter: Comedy and Contemporary Irish
Theatre edited by Eric Weitz (2004).
Elin Diamond, writing of feminist performance theory, uses the
example of Alan IS Wife, a late nineteenth-century American play, to
explore the possibility of 'reading ' silences and the actor' s body's ability
to translate stage directions. In the fmal scene of the play written by
Elizabeth Robins and Florence Bell (although published anonymously
with an introduction by William Archer) Jean Creyke appears before the
20
The "Comeback" of Performance
In a 1996 essay Anna McMullan recalls the performance tradition in
Irish theater, present even in the heady days of the early Abbey. Yeats,
O' Casey, and Beckett all explored aspects of the theater that involved
different modes of communication and that challenged the way we
understand and defme theater. McMullan cites numerous examples of
contemporary companies that are also stretching the boundaries of what
comprises theater in Ireland today many of which will be discussed later.
She asserts that performance is making a comeback" and believes that the
"lack of performance in its own right, and the limited possibilities of
performance training and development in Ireland until recently ... [have]
meant that performance traditions in the main theatres have tended to
support the dominance of the writer's text ' (29). The recentering that
McMullan identified coincided with the surge in theater companies and
the rise of an increased international audience for Irish productions. In
fact, this refocusing- and increased grants by the Irish Arts Council-did
open up the playing field for more independent small, and often transitory
theater companies to bring their version of Irish society to the stage or the
street.
22
Chapter One
Defining the Moment
court for smothering her crippled child (a crime of which she is guilty).
The text provides both stage directions and prose sentences for Jean, but
she is silent throughout the scene. Diamond explains: ' In the stage
performance of Alan's Wife, Jean is silent under questioning, but in the
text, these silences are translated intro prose sentences, the accuracy of
which would be impossible to represent ' (1997 36). She explains the
lasting impact of this authorial decision:
conversation about post-apartheid South African literature. This play is
perceived as important, so people have found a way to talk about it. Irish
theater that incorporates elements of ' performance" is also important in an
Irish context and to ignore it is to ignore a substantial current in
contemporary Irish drama. Understanding it will help us to comprehend
the directions in which Irish theater is moving and why.
By wedging a space between the body and the text of the body [the
playwrights] displace the imaginary wholeness of the actor in realism,
making her truth provisional contingent. Alan 's Wife . . . does not abandon
narrative, but it refuses the closure of positivist inquiry. It does not
dismantle the text as a unique source of meaning, but it destabilizes the
relation between text and performance, each contaminating the other. (37)
We continually see this same 'contamination" in the 1990s. The
fluidity of borders between text and performance comes at a time when
other borders, markers, and defmitions are called into question or are
und~rmined b~ social relations. In the late nineteenth century, gender
relations were m flux. The inclusion of (or insistence upon) performance
"dism~ntles textu~1 authority illusionism [in the Brechtian sense], and the
canomcal actor m favor of the ' polymorphous thinking body' of the
performer, a sexual, permeable, tactile body a ' semiotic bundle of drives '
that scourges audience narrativity" (Diamond 1997, 84).6 Diamond's
?escri~tion seems to refer very directly to the work of Operating Theatre,
m whIch the body of the performer (often 01 wen Fouere) emphasizes its
sexuality, its frailty, and its permeability without the assistance of a text.
There are examples of plays that are less textually bound but still have
been the subject of a wealth of scholarship. Perhaps the most relevant to
this discussion is Ubu and the Truth Commission by Jane Taylor William
Kentridge and the Handspring Puppet Company. The play, set in South
Africa during the. Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings,
adapts the surreahst 1896 Alfred Jarry play Ubu Roi, to a South African
context, .incorporating actual TRC testimony. The play uses puppets,
cross-racIal and mUltiple casting animation and film projections and the
rea] words of victims in several different languages to communicate the
inner chaos of Pere Ubu and his and the country' s need to bear witness to
the past to create a future, although the outcome of the play is not
optimistic about the power of the TRC. 7 This powerful play does not read
we~l on the. page as the projections are missing along with the puppets,
whIch dommate the performance. Yet the political impact of the play was
so great that scholars have treated and analyzed it as part of an ongoing
23
Parallels in the American Theater
Considering the history of cultural and economic exchange between
Ireland and the United States it is not surprising that there are strong
parallels between the Irish move toward performance and the American
avant-garde theater movement· a brief overview of the American avantgarde theatrical history, then, will be instructive for the Irish case. I must
state first that I am not calling the move to performance an Irish avantgarde. Theorists and practitioners alike reject this label as both indicating a
high level of political content (generally missing from the Irish theater
under discussion here) and as having mostly spent its usefulness. I
therefore avoid this label, although I fmd the comparison with the
American avant-garde and Off-Off-Broadway movements instructive. In
the 1960s, America was undergoing enormous social change through
integration, the women' s movement and the change in American work
and play habits. At the same time, American theater changed as theater
practitioners challenged the existing definitions of space and the concept
of storytelling through the Off-Off Broadway movement: These groups
defied conventional uses of space and text with the result that the rigidity
of theatrical practice broke down performance values gained ascendancy
over dialogue and the visual image began to supplant language in the
hierarchy of theatrical elements" (Marranca 1977, 114). This quote neatly
describes what happened in Irish theater in the 1990s, particularly
regarding the breakdown of the hierarchy of director/actor and the rise of
devised theater, as welJ as dialogue becoming only one part of the
theatrical event. But while the American avant-garde went on to eschew
dialogue completely at times and at others to include shocking and graphic
performance art, the Irish theater remained at least partially subsidized by
the government and therefore more accessible to a wider audience.
In the American context, theater artists such as Richard Foreman, the
members of the Open Theater, Robert Wilson, and Richard Schechner s
Performance Group explicitly sought to create a new theater rejecting
Broadway and even Off-Broadway as too commercialized. Once emphasis
and value were placed on performance "the new theatre never became a
25
Chapter One
Deflning the Moment
literary theatre, but one dominated by images-visual and aural" (Marranca
1977, ix). In the American case, artists distrusted words because of the
end to which they were used by politicians and advertising. It was also
recognized that some experiential concepts cannot be expressed by words"
(Shank 2002 4). Both of these ideas hold true in Ireland. The corrupt
nature of Irish politics came to the forefront-and front page-consistently
in the late 1980s and early 1990s, its earliest manifestation in the Beef
Tribunals. 8
Although Ireland was long a country that relied upon the word and that
produced a rather remarkable number of gifted writers, Irish artists chose
to develop a new vocabulary of performance, which, as I have argued
above, requires a new vocabulary of criticism. Perhaps the small size of
the theater community explains why the Irish move toward performance
never fully rejected dialogue, preferring instead to find it insufficient to
always express an emotion or concept, particularly in a society changing
as much and as quickly as Ireland in the 1990s did much like America in
the 1960s. In her book The Theatre of Images, Bonnie Marranca discusses
a theater that abandoned literary techniques such as plot, character, setting,
language, and movement to focus on images exclusively, but these literary
elements never fully left the Irish context. In Ireland, theater practitioners
held to literary techniques even as they-somewhat contradictorilyeschewed literary texts. The tradition of storytelling remains so ingrained
in Irish culture that even the most nonliterary texts retain elements of the
storytelling process. While the written word was viewed as static, ideas of
character and plot became more fluid, so that many actors might play a
single character or vice versa.
Members of the American avant-garde undermined the nature of
character by emphasizing the idea and body of the performer, a method
that many Irish companies eventually adopted. Joseph Chaikin, director of
the Open Theatre, created ' non-illusionistic actor training exercises ...
designed to intensify what he called the 'presence' of the actor as distinct
from the character" (Shank 2002, 4). This methodology contrasts sharply
with the Stanislavsky method which encourages actors to fully embody
and mentally become their characters, so that there are no seams between
actor and character. The Open Theatre rejected realism and sought to
explore the 'unique possibilities of live theatre as distinct from television
and cinema" (6). In its first production, Viet Rock the continuity of the
performance is held together by the persistence of the performers rather
than specific characters.
. American and Irish theatrical histories also share a focus on process
and a strong desire to make the process more democratic and less linear.
Taking a cue from Brecht, the American Theatre of Images focused so
much on process that they allowed the theatrical "seams" to show.
Marranca states that this was ' an attempt to make the audience more
conscious of events in the theatre than they are accustomed to. It is the
idea of being there in the theatre that is the impulse" (1977, xii). As
discussed earlier, Irish performance-based productions explored
metatheatricality, from converting the foyer into part of the set to
eliminating the set altogether and relying on the audience' s imagination to
fill in the gaps. Once the seams start showing, however, and the
production eschews dialogue in whole or part, the audi~nce. must w?rk
harder to decode the production. Theodore Shank summarizes It by saymg
that these alternative theater groups are
24
not primarily concerned with entertainment as a product to be sold.
Instead, they are eager to improve the quality of life for themselves and
their audiences.... The alternative theater tends to reflect the commitment
of the group . . . . However, the most important changes are the
development of an autonomous creative method, a shift from the
dominance of words to a visual emphasis, and an aesthetic that keeps
spectators conscious of the real world rather that focusing them exclusively
on a flctional illusion. (2002, 3)
Perhaps chief among these companies is the Bread and Puppet Theatre,
founded by Peter Schumann in 1961. Schumann began to introduce large
sculpted bodies into dance performances" as early as 1956' one hallmark
of his performances is that they are accessible to everyone: 'You don ' t
make your point unless a five-year-old girl can understand it. If she gets it
the grownups will too (Brown and Seitz 1968 66). Schumann' s influence
on the Irish theatrical parades discussed in chapter 3 is immediately
evident to spectators familiar with Bread and Puppet' s work. Indeed
Bread and Puppet books are frequently found in the Macnas workshop in
Fisheries Field in Galway. Also like Irish theatrical parades, "Bread and
Puppet productions are intended to include the spectator in a community
made up of performer and other spectators" (Shank 2002, 112). This is a
key component to the social function of a big Macnas parade.
American avant-garde theater, according to Arnold Aronson, looked
outside the 'so-called ' real ' world ' for reference points, to 'other forms of
art, the creative power of the artist and the theatrical experience itself. '
American avant-garde theater, like its Irish counterpart, 'was not
fundamentally linear, illusionistic, thematic or psychological ... it was a
non-literary theater-meaning not that it lacked language but that it could
not be read in the way a work of literature could be (2000 5). Thus one
26
27
Chapter One
Defming the Moment
of the greatest similarities between these two strands of twentieth-century
theater is the rejection of the literary. Although not necessarily overtly
political Irish experimental theater nonetheless had political implications
as- like its American counterpart- it strove 'toward a radical
restructuring of the way in which an audience views and experiences the
very act of theatre, which in tum must transform the way in which the
spectators view themselves and the world" (7). Once theater engages with
questions regarding what theater is and seeks to redefme the role of the
spectator, it becomes implicitly political. Especially taken alongside the
revered place of theater in Irish society- schoolchildren in Ireland learn
about the Abbey Theatre and the role of W. B. Yeats in Irish literary and
political history- an attempt to restructure the theatrical event must be
political.
At the same time, these Irish artists sought to change the nature of the
theater audience. With theater audiences declining and theater of course
competing with cinema concerts, and raves, independent and
experimental theater reached out to younger audiences in an attempt to
change the face of the average theatergoer. Some of the younger theater
companies have been successful at this.
According to a survey conducted by the Cultural Policy and the Arts
wing of the National Data Archive, approximately 12.3 percent of adult
Americans attended a nonmusical play in 2002. Slightly more attended a
musical play, 17.1 percent; both of these figures exclude performances in
elementary middle, or high schools (CPANDA). In the United Kingdom,
the figure rises to 24 percent of the population that had attended a play in
2001- 2 (Office of National Statistics). In Ireland, however, according to a
survey conducted in 1994 (before the major economic reforms were fully
implemented and had affected the average person) 36 percent of the Irish
population had attended a play in the past year (Clancy et al. 1994, 36)!
An art form that commands more than a third of the population' s attention
and leisure spending is not to be taken lightly. More than anything, this
statistic indicates the extent to which theater holds an important place in
the Irish imagination. 9
Most modem observers consider the American avant-garde theater of
the 1960s now officially dead, as it has been subsumed into mainstream
American theater, and practitioners such as Anne Bogart now teach at
prestigious universities and their work is studied in undergraduate courses
around the country. \0 Yet as the American avant-garde was declared
~ead-as early as 1981 by Richard Schechner- so, too, this particular
moment of Irish theater has passed. Schechner stated that "performance
once more is ephemeral, the work of crazies, bourgeois-manques,
bohemians: ' artists. ' I regard the period, the people the groups, the work
in receding perspective: a parade passed, and still distantly heard piping"
(1981 , 51). Schechner' s obituary however, may well have arisen out of
his being ousted by the Wooster Group, which he founded.
In contrast, Shank rejoices in what he calls an autonomous method of
creating," namely a process in which the same people are involved in the
entire process, from "initial conception to finished performance.' Shank
finds that the American development of this process "was a reaction
against the psychic fragmentation the artists experienced in the
technocratic society which believed that human needs could be satisfied"
by technology, particularly that which "require[es] a high degree of
specialization" (2002, 3). The Irish reaction to a fragmenting society
rejected tradition- seen as a positive change-and attempted to maintain
community, to ensure that the community s values and experiences were
reflected onstage. A theater company need not · stray too far from the
devices and appearance of mainstream theater to do this: Belfast's
Charabanc is perhaps the best example of a theater company working hard
to reflect its community.
Another contributing factor in the decline of the American avant-garde
is the "explosive growth of technology" (Aronson 2000, 201). Theater,
conventional wisdom claims cannot keep up with the technological
advances nor the budgets of media such as rock concerts. Big Broadway
productions starting in the 1980s certainly tried, with such spectacles as
Miss Saigon, which set the standard for expensive, flashy productions. In
1984, a Broadway musical cost around $3 million to produce; in 2003
Wicked cost its producers $14 million. In addition, the World Wide Web
changed the way we perceive and receive information. As we begin to
organize the world in hyperlinks, theatrical attempts to reflect this such as
'Richard Foreman' s ubiquitous strings, which drew connections between
seemingly disparate objects, seem almost as quaint as nineteenth-century
expositional monologues ' (202). The incorporation of media into
performances by select Irish companies is widely viewed as the next step,
not as something experimental or avant-garde.
What is interesting about the parallels between the American avantgarde of the 1960s and the Irish theater scene of the 1990s is not that the
American case might have been instructive if we had looked at it in, say,
1995, but that Irish theater was influenced so little by it. The similarity of
the two trajectories suggests that any theatrical movement seeking to break
with tradition might follow the same path rather than that the American
case laid the groundwork for Ireland. This is not to argue, however, that
there was no influence from America on the Irish theatre of movement.
28
Chapter One
Defming the Moment
Robert Wilson 's 1985 appearance at the Dublin Theatre Festival certainly
had an impact on what might be possible theatrically in Ireland, which has
been the focus of this shift.
of strategies and conventions that allow scholars to see practices that
narrative poetry or even drama as a scripted genre might occlude' (2007,
1417). This wave of Irish performance appeared as a reaction to a fastchanging Irish society and the performers relied on new techniques to
help them in the ongoing quest to consolidate Irish identity a concept
suddenly in dispute as the pace and nature of Irish culture shifted with the
expanding Tiger economy and the demands of globalization. The
naturalistic theater so familiar to audiences at the Abbey and Gate
Theatres remains locked in a particular stance on Ireland, namely, that the
most pure" or sustainable component of Irish society is rural, uneducated,
and longing to leave Ireland for a more "modem" place, generally England
or America. Performance-based theater embraces the urban and global
influences through its very form , and these formal qualities make possible
a breaking away from the past and an engagement with contemporary
issues. Irish theater artists try to reflect European (and increasingly
African and Asian) influences on Irish society through a syncretic method
of creating and re-presenting theater for which extra-linguistic theatrical
elements provide a stronger expressive platform. As scholars, we ignore
this change in theater at our peril as it has already begun to be
incorporated into the mainstream and, in the early years of the twenty-first
century these performance techniques show no signs of dissipation. We
need then to develop a language of criticism that will allow for a
nontraditional performance text (in the Schechnerian sense) that appears
less fixed (but is in reality no less precise than any established
playwright's script might be) and uses words as only one landscape of
performance.
Conclusion
O'Toole acknowledged in 2000 that Ireland is no longer a shared
place, or "one Ireland," and thus "we can no longer have a naturalistic
theatre of recognition in which a world is signaled to us through objects
and we tacitly agree to recognize it as our own. We must instead have a
theatre of evocation in which strange worlds, not our own, are in Yeats '
phrase ' called to the eye of the mind'" (O'Toole 2000, 57). Thus it only
makes sense that more than one method of creating and presenting drama
was called for; a method in which the literary is privileged could no longer
be the only method. As Irish society rejected the fiction of a united society
and the hope of a united Ireland- Eamon de Valera' s vision of IrelandIrish culture was no longer satisfied with only one kind of theater. The
performance emphasis reflects societal change and works more effectively
as a ' theatre of evocation." As Ireland became more cosmopolitan, a
member of the European and global communities so too did its theater
practice.
. Playw?ght Declan Hughes asks, "Why does contemporary Irish
~Iterature Igno~e contemporary Ireland?" (2000, 8). He criticizes plays set
m pubs and kItchens, declaring that the insistence on these settings ' is a
form of perverse nostalgia: nostalgia for the time when we think we were
Irish, when we had an identity.' He classifies this nostalgia as ' the Irish
disease. " The reliance on tradition that underpins these contemporary texts
(even while they reject it) Hughes finds as a form of cannibalism and he
calls on Irish drama to show more guts: the guts to stop fla~ting its
ancestry" (11). Hughes calls upon Irish theater to 'embrace the profound
change that has occurred" in the past thirty years: 'that we are barely a
country any more, never have been and never will be that most nineteenth
century of dreams, a nation once again" (13). Much of the theater
discussed in this book accepts Hughes' s challenge, but because of its
?lien~ting form and the lack of a text that theater scholars could easily
Identify and analyze, went unremarked upon and largely uncritiqued.
Although often dismissed as fringe or ephemeral the move toward
performance makes possible new ways of understanding Irish theater and
society. Releasing Irish theater from the confines of the text allows for a
freedom of interpretations and methods. Diana Taylor notes that
'performance as a genre allows for alternative mappings, providing a set
29
Notes
I Trinity College opened its drama department- Ireland s ftrst at the university
level- in 1984. The Gaiety School of Acting, created in response to the absence of
a full-time actor-training program in Ireland, began in 1986.
2 Barabbas' s official name is Barabbas ... the company. to distinguish itself from,
say, Barabbas . . . the festival or any other event it chooses to produce. For
simplicity' s sake, I will sinlply use "Barabbas" to refer to the company. Further,
Murfi left Barabbas in 2001 and has been pursuing individual projects, including
velY successful directing.
3 In 1998, the Dmid Theatre s production of Martin McDonagh's Beauty Queen of
Leenane won Best Actor in a Drama and Best Actress in a Drama, and made Gany
Hynes the first woman to win Best Director.
4 Brook acknowledged Grotowski in his explanation of these questions.
30
Chapter One
5 On Sunday, 30 January 1972 the British army fired shots on a disturbance that
arose after a civil rights demonstration. A total of fourteen people died and the
public was outraged. It is widely believed that the crowd was unarmed.
6 First quote: H. Blau, 'Precipitations of Theater: Words, Presence, Time out of
Mind," in Blooded Thought (PAJ 1982), 30. Second quote: Josette Feral,
"Performance and Theatricality: the Subject Demystified," Modern Drama
25.1(1982}: 177.
7 For more information on Ubll and the Truth Commission, see Graham 2003;
I(jppen 2002; and Marlin-Curiel 2001.
8 Widespread fraud and malpractice was discovered in Ireland's beef industry in
the early 1990s. No allegations could be proved, however, and no poljtician or
industrialist was ever charged, although an official inquiry known as the Beef
Tribunal, was established. For more on the Beef Tribunal, see Fintan 0 Toole's
insightful Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch: The Politics of Irish Beef(1994}.
9 There is anecdotal evidence, however that general attendance and ticket sales are
considerably down since the downturn in the Irish economy in 2001.
10 Bogart teaches at Columbia and maintains strong ties to the Irish theater sector,
as many young theater practitioners have trained in her Viewpoints method. Most
recently she was the keynote speaker at the 14th Annual Irish Theatre Institute
Conference and Networking Event, held to coincide with the Dublin Theatre
Festival in 2007.